Weird science learns the more exotic, the better, when it comes to dung

This week, weird science shows an unnatural fixation with bodily functions. We …

Dung beetles have no customer loyalty:This paper just grabs you with the first sentence: "Although the preference of dung beetles (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) for specific types and conditions of dung has been given substantial attention, little has been done to investigate the potential effects of exotic mammal introduction." It both calls you to look through its references to past work (who were these people who gave dung beetle preferences substantial attention, and what conditions of dung did they test?), it also begs you to read on, and discover whether the dung of exotic animals is, well, exotic. Apparently, the beetles are hot for primate dung, with humans and chimps coming out ahead in the taste test.

The press release is also worth a read, earning bonus Weird Science points for the title, "Exotic manure is sure to lure the dung connoisseur." It points out that the dung beetles may just be seeking variety, as "native Nebraskan dung beetles which coevolved with bison showed little attraction to bison dung compared with waterbuck, zebra, donkey, and moose dung."

The hazards of cleanliness: This isn't exactly a major threat to human health, but it's apparently happening a few times a year at a hospital in Providence, Rhode Island: individuals come in, complaining of abdominal pain or painful swallowing. X-rays revealed small, think metal objects perforating the digestive tract of the subjects. Interviews with the patients cleared up the mystery. It turns out all of them had been doing some grilling, and cleaned their hardware with a wire brush, which was apparently the source of the metal shards.

Don't eat the wires, do eat the chocolates: Chocolate may come with a healthy dose of sugar, but it also includes a complex brew of antioxidants and other chemicals that can affect metabolism. Where does it balance out? In favor of moderate chocolate consumption, according to this study. This isn't exactly an invitation to chow down on a pint of Ben & Jerry's but it is an indication that avoiding chocolate for health reasons may be somewhat short-sighted.

Yes, but do they hate Wal-Mart? Generally, membership in what are commonly referred to as hate groups rises in times of economic disruption. So, a group of researchers went through and looked at county-by-county figures on the prevalence of hate groups across the US, checking for correlations with things like unemployment rate, high crime rates, and low education. Various measures of social well being did correlate with hate group membership, but none of them showed as strong a statistical correlation as the prevalence of Wal-Mart stores. "Both social capital stocks and religious affiliation exert an independent and statistically significant influence on the number of hate groups, as does the presence of Wal-Mart stores, holding other factors constant," the authors conclude.

Hyenas give up on humans for Lent: Fossilized owl vomit remains my favorite research tool (for tracking the prevalence of extinct rodents, naturally), but hyena droppings may place high on my list. An international team of scientists, armed with a collection of 533 individual droppings, tracked the dietary habits of a group of spotted hyenas from Ethiopia. During much of the year, these animals appear to help humans get rid of their trash, scrounging on household refuse and the waste from butchers' shops. But, each year, the local human population gives up meat and dairy products for nearly two months, and the droppings show that this forces the hyenas to return to hunting. Humans still help out here, however, as donkeys become one of the hyenas' primary victims.

Biochemists may help the fragrance industry kick its whale barf habit: Bodily functions seem to be the theme this week, so we'll close with a paper that I found via a press release entitled, "How to make high-end perfumes without whale barf." Ambergris is basically the hair ball of the sperm whale, formed to protect their guts from any sharp objects the swallow, then vomited back up and collected along the shores near known sperm whale habitats. It is then, believe it or not, put into high-end perfumes.

You wouldn't necessarily expect a paper entitled "Bifunctional cis-Abienol Synthase from Abies balsamea Discovered by Transcriptome Sequencing and Its Implications for Diterpenoid Fragrance Production" to address whale vomit, but science, as you may have noticed, is sometimes funny that way. It turns out that balsam firs also produce small quantities of the same chemical, and the researchers have turned taken samples from the fir and sent them through high-throughput DNA sequencing, identifying the enzyme responsible. So, it's possible that we'll be able to replace whale guts with a test tube at some point in the future.